Facilitating the Design and Analysis of Middle School Students’ Reasoning in the Context of Citizen Science

Abstract Important everyday decisions warrant the integration of statistical, scientific, and Nature of Science (NOS) reasoning. While each of these three types of reasoning is distinct and has been mostly examined separately, they have many interrelations. A deeper appreciation of the interrelations between the three can greatly inform how to concurrently nurture all three, thus empowering today’s young learners with the necessary skills in our data-driven society. In this article, we introduce a framework we developed to describe some of the interrelations between the three types of reasoning in relation to the central statistical and scientific practice of formulating data-based claims. To illustrate its affordances, we then offer a case study of a pair of middle school students’ engagement with a learning sequence that accompanied the pair’s participation in a Citizen Science project, whose design was inspired by the framework. Our findings introduce four versions of the practice that the students expressed and the typical aspects of statistical, scientific, and NOS reasoning associated with each. A detailed account of how these emerged and progressed provides additional insight on the interrelations between the three types of reasoning. Particularly, while the students’ initial one-sided NOS views inhibit the expression of additional and more complex scientific and statistical reasoning, extending them through the engagement of the learning sequence we developed allowed the expression of more mature, rich and interrelated scientific, statistical, and NOS considerations.